The Digital Age has brought a myriad of both issues and innovations to the music industry. While countless articles are dedicated to exposing how the Digital Age will lead to the death of the music industry, we can also look at the marketing innovations that bands are taking advantage of due to the rise of social media and online business. Let’s take a look at a few New Release campaigns that have come across my radar. The good, the bad, and the ugly; it’s all here.

The Killers fall under the ugliest of the bunch. They launched a Facebook campaign to unveil the cover of their album cover. Though the premise doesn’t seem all that terrible, the execution failed to create much buzz. Instead of creating an innovative contest, the contest required fans to go through an exhaustive list of requirements that included liking and sharing the page, before you could unlock the image. The campaign failed to excite me for a couple fundamental reasons.1) It was an inauthentic “Like” grab: At no point did I feel motivated or engaged by the campaign. It didn’t even attempt to pretend to be looking for engagement or loyalty. It simply called out for “Likes”, which as most marketers should have realized by now, don’t always equate to much equity.2)It was too easy to bypass the requirements: Once one person liked and shared the page, they had access to an image that could be easily copied and shared across the web. Why jump through hoops to gain access to the album cover when you could Google it at this point? This made it impossible for the actual campaign to go viral.

Mother Mother took a stab at a similar contest, by creating an album cover reveal campaign that required social media followers to collect puzzle pieces to assemble the album cover. Though this one didn’t seem to gain a ton of traction either, it avoided becoming redundant too quickly by requiring the task to be completed over time. It was also more engaging because it required fans to follow the band’s social media in order to keep track of the pieces. This made the campaign more authentic, and most likely, more successful than that of The Killer’s.

Green Day recently made use of Chirpify to promote their upcoming trilogy. The campaign simply required twitter followers to reply “buy” to their account in order to gain access to an exclusive $30 deal for the full-set of albums. Given that it was a limited time offer and so easy to participate, they were able to quickly secure 250 purchases in four hours. Never mind the 9000 new twitter followers they earned within ten hours of launching the campaign. The only flaw I’d point out is that the consumer still needed to go and actually pay for the deal later on, which blocked the path to purchase a little bit.

The XX had one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen in awhile. They sent a stream of their new album to a single person and set up a website to track their sharing from that point forward. It could have awkwardly failed at that point, but instead, it went on to actually map the virility of the campaign in real time. How cool is that? At this point, it’s already hit major music media sites, and has been listened to by people across the globe. All that from one initial fan and the power of the Digital Age. Check it out here: http://coexist.thexx.info/

Of course the Digital Age has disrupted the way that the music industry used to work. Bands now have to realize that by embracing the power of social media and by finding new, authentic ways to engage their listeners, they might actually be able to reach new heights with the way the industry behaves today. What other campaigns have you seen kicking around? Which ones blew you away with innovation and which ones fizzled?